Clickbait media is what's stirring this craze for meaningless forks. There's a lot of hype around forks to the Bitcoin network, and the media (groups such as Cointelegraph) are cashing in on the hype by publicising any utter bullshit that comes their way without any kind of regard for the relevance or necessity of the fork.
Once these forks gain publicity, customers start asking exchanges and online wallet services to give them the new fork at a 1:1 ratio, and then people start trading them because exchanges feel that they have an obligation to their customers (most of which own BTC).
It's a very clever tactic of creating hype and unnecessary trading around something which should be pretty much worthless. I predict that there will be far more forks over the following year or two.